To: Vincent Boudreau, president, The City College of New York (CCNY)

From: Douaa Labdouni, student staff

Date: September 13th, 2023

Subject: Diversification of Affordable Food Options in the NAC Cafeteria

The purpose of this memo is to push for the implementation of an upgraded food experience for students at the campus cafeteria.

Summary

Currently, all City College students who dine on campus have only three options: fried empanadas, hispanic food bar, and halal cart food. While these options are not necessarily dissatisfying, the lack of other healthy and affordable options is a huge problem for many campus-goers. Students want healthy, affordable, and diverse meal options in the cafeteria, and are tired of few options that are either unhealthy or expensive. I believe that it is necessary to implement a cafeteria upgrade in which we open up various new and healthy food options. These options would be ones that students actually want and can afford. I would like to have a conversation with you about these changes at any time, if convenient for you.

Discussion

A college cafeteria is supposed to help students easily access food to help fuel them in their studies. In addition, the cafeteria acts as a social commonground for students. As a college campus, it is CCNY’s duty to provide ample resources and facilities to its over 15,000 students. The choices of food and drink are meant to be convenient, affordable, diverse and healthy. Compared to these expectations, the CCNY cafeteria is quite lacking.

As a primary focus, we should develop a strong consensus of what the students actually want to see in the cafeteria. Sending out a survey to all students’ citymail emails would be a quick and efficient method of doing this. Two questions that I believe would be necessary in this survey are “What cuisines would you be most excited to see in the NAC cafeteria?” and “How satisfied are you with the current catalog of cuisine choices in the NAC cafeteria?”. These two questions would help to instantly guide our efforts to the corresponding steps of implementation. Other questions that would be helpful to include are, “How attentive are you to your dietary health choices?”, “How much money, on average, do you spend in the NAC cafeteria each week?”, “What are your health and/or dietary preferences?” and “How often do you leave campus in search of an alternate food choice/ what food do you then get?” These questions would help inspire a decision on what affordable and healthy spots to open up in the cafeteria.

The next steps, of course, would be to initiate the opening of new dining options. For one, there is plenty of empty space in the cafeteria to open three or four new food units for students to purchase food. To my knowledge, all these spaces are fully equipped with cafeteria equipment and can be conveniently reinstated. The new spaces would need to have new signs, cleaned workstations, and payment terminals. These can also be staffed quite readily with CCNY students who qualify for federal work study, at no extra cost to the college. After these two steps, the CCNY cafeteria would efficiently improve its options in number and in student satisfaction.

To finally revolutionize the campus dining experience, it is crucial to make these healthy and diverse food options accessible to every student. An integral method of doing so would be to make it even more affordable. My proposal to help our college aid students financially in the cafeteria is to offer dining credits. In most colleges around the US, students have the option of purchasing a “Meal Plan,” though they don’t always have the same terms and conditions. I believe the conditions that would benefit CCNY the most would be to have two separate options: credit distribution before transaction, or with transaction. As for the credit distribution before the transaction, we can allot funding to the cafeteria as a joint finance. This will serve as a mass-discount to students by covering a certain percentage of all transactions. The other option, credit distribution with tuition, will further provide assistance to students who pay for a meal discount card. These funds can be either out-of-pocket or included in a student’s financial package. 

Recommendation

Thank you very much for the consideration of this proposal. I highly recommend that this is put into practice as it would be a great improvement to the student satisfaction of our college. If the current cafeteria situation is changed, CCNY students will be much more satisfied with their college and campus, and the school will be more appealing to new applicants. These solutions also provide more work-study openings, healthier food choices for everyone and just an overall revolutionized campus dining environment. I am happy to meet with you to discuss details and decisions to implement this upgrade at any time. You can reach me anytime at [email protected] to arrange a meeting or for any necessary follow-ups.